Of the books published in America in 1911, little public attention was paid to a novel about two Arab boys' adventures in New York City by Lebanese-born writer Ameen Rihani. But in the century following, the ideas in “The Book of Khalid” have had far-reaching influence in the Middle East and the West Immigration stories had a market in the United States in the early 20th century, with works such as The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's narrative of a Lithuanian family in Chicago, and Abraham Cahan's tales of Russian-Jewish immigrants. But “The Book of Khalid”, whose 100th anniversary was marked with a symposium at the Library of Congress on March 29, was a very different story. Ameen Rihani (1876–1940) immigrated to New York at the age of 11. He studied English and then joined the family merchant business. During this time he read Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle, all of whose influence can be felt in “The Book of Khalid”. Rihani attended the New York School of Law, but a lung infection cut short his studies and he returned to Lebanon to recover. Returning to New York in 1899, Rihani established himself as an innovative poet in both Arabic and English. (He introduced blank verse — unrhymed lines usually in iambic pentameter — to Arabic poetry.) He became an American citizen in 1901, but traveled between America and the Middle East for all his life. In Lebanon, he wrote a collection of essays in Arabic as well as “The Book of Khalid”, thought to be the first English-language novel written by an Arab. The novel presents itself as having been pieced together by an editor — the narrator — who has found an unusual manuscript in the Khedivial Library of Cairo. The editor quotes from the manuscript, written by a philosopher-traveler named Khalid, and another by the poet Shakib, Khalid's friend and traveling companion. The book gives Khalid's grand and spiritual musings and Shakib's earthy practicality. “The material is of such a mixture,” explains the editor, “that here and there the raw silk of Syria is often spun with the cotton and wool of America. In other words, the Author dips his antique pen in a modern inkstand.” The fictional characters Khalid and Shakib immigrate to an area of Manhattan known as Little Syria, where they peddle counterfeit holy trinkets. Khalid is soon drawn into the bohemian intellectual scene of New York and rejects the dishonest peddling. He tries his hand at politics, working for the corrupt Tammany Hall political organization, but when he insists on conducting his work honestly, his boss jails him briefly for misappropriation of funds. Disappointed by the materialism and corruption of New York City, Khalid returns with Shakib to their homeland. There, Khalid clashes with local clerics and is excommunicated. He travels from city to city spreading his ideas, longing for a civilization that joins the spirituality of the East with the scientific progress of the West. He causes a riot at the Great Mosque in Damascus, and the authorities pursue his arrest. Khalid eventually breaks contact with Shakib and disappears. The reader is left with the image of Khalid as a madman with an eye on a future no one else can see. Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress, said the symposium took place “at a time when things are changing so rapidly in the Middle East and when you have young people in many of the countries of the region actually upholding some of those very ideas: that there is no East and West, that we're all part of a global community, that extremism is not the answer. More people in the U.S. want an open society and an open world. And in a way those were the values that Ameen Rihani was talking about in his works.” Todd Fine, director of Project Khalid and the organizer of the Library of Congress event, is editing a new edition of “The Book of Khalid” for Syracuse University Press. Over the three decades following initial publication of “The Book of Khalid”, Rihani would play an important role as an unofficial ambassador for American interests. He traveled frequently from America to the Middle East. He established a lifelong friendship with Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, and published a well-regarded series of travel books about the Arabian Peninsula. “He dedicated his entire life to bridging East and West,” said his nephew Ramzi Rihani, “and as much as he was an American living in New York and fully at home in America, he was fully at home in Lebanon. And Saudi Arabia. He was Christian by birth, but if you asked him his religion, he'd say, ‘I'm an Arab-American.'” The Book of Khalid is available through Project Gutenberg. More information is available on Project Khalid at its website. Contributed by the US Embassy, Riyadh.
